A man who used an assault rifle to save a Hawaiian neighborhood from a flow of hot lava is being hailed as a hero today.

Alerted by a woman's cry of distress and the smell of sulfur, Darrell Moreland of the Big Island's Puna district wasted no time grabbing his AR-15 from his gun locker Thursday morning.

"I go outside and see Armageddon. Trees are on fire, telephone poles are on fire, dogs are barking, and a giant mountain of hot lava is coming right at me, swallowing up this Ford Focus," recounted Moreland.

"Aiming my rifle at it, I ordered it to stop, but it was kind of hard to tell whether it did or not," Moreland went on. "I thought it did."

But then, according to Moreland, the lava kept coming.

"I could tell by how much of the Focus was still visible - the lava had reached the front tires after only being to the door handles when I first got there - and so I opened fire, hitting it with every shot of a 30-round magazine," he said.

According to witnesses, the molten flow ceased less than half an hour later.

"Darrell did it," one neighbor exalted. "He shot that lava."

Still, Moreland rejects the idea that he's a hero.

"I was only doing what lot of other guys would do," he said. "As long as we protect our Second Amendment rights."